Some Background

Hey, I thought I'd give a little background on my museum experience.  (Not part of my CV) ---> My earliest museum memories are going to the Provincial Museum of Alberta (now Royal Alberta Museum [RAM]) and Fort Edmonton Park.  Both of these I went to various times in my childhood, sometimes with my family, sometimes with a school group, and also managed to find other ways to get there.  The John Janzen Nature Centre should also be included in this.  I loved to get a book related to my experience and loved everything about these experiences - though most of all, I loved dinosaurs.

Years later, I was able to work two consecutive years as a volunteer at the Provincial Museum of Alberta (not yet, RAM) on a medieval exhibit, where they utilized my 'expertise' in medieval history, which was my area of concentration for my Bachelors degree in History at the University of Alberta.  That was my first taste of museum work, but I was able to get some training as part of my Anthropology training, taking a course in artifact handling.  Before that I had a great experience in Inverness, Scotland at their civic museum where I paid for a 3 day tour of various archaeological sites in the area, which included an extensive tour of the work and storage rooms of the museum.  I felt like I was becoming a museum expert already.

My next experience was volunteering at the Marischal Museum in Aberdeen, Scotland, where I became a regular there for three years.  I was even hired for a full summer as a student intern and worked 9-5, 5 days a week.  That was probably my most valuable experience, where I had a great mentor in Neil Curtis, the curator.  During the whole three years, he entrusted me to catalogue the museum's Scottish coin collection, dating back to the Roman Empire.  During my summer internship I was part of the team that rescued the collection from an infestation of spider beetles, which was also used as an opportunity to transfer a large number of artefacts from the old storage area to the newly created one - from the tower to the basement (you can imagine the walk between each one.  I was also part of a smaller team that catalogued and reorganized the painting and print collection belonging to the university - large project for a 500 year old university.  Amongst the various projects I assisted and was entrusted with, partly with a team and partly on my own, I organized the museum's Egyptology collection in the new storage, setting the parameters for the records storage area.

Marischal College, home of Marischal Museum owned by The University of Aberdeen

http://www.abdn.ac.uk/marischal_museum/

With this experience behind me, upon my return home, I spent 4 years finishing the thesis that I began in Scotland, at home in Alberta.  With the lag time between continents and examiners going on sabbatical during my rewrites, it took a bit longer than I expected.  In the meantime, I decided a career in the museum field was exactly what I should have been doing and set about researching where to go for my training, this time within Canada, though ideally, I would have loved to have gone back to Scotland to work.  I found Sir Sandford Fleming College and their Museum Management and Curatorship program and decided it would be perfect for me, with their hands on type of training and intensive 1-year postgraduate program.  The 1st year I applied I was accepted, but because I was still working on my thesis, I turned them down, quite correctly realizing that I could not accomplish both at the same time.  I applied again the next year, but was not accepted, since their numbers are very limited.  I tried again for the 3rd time and told myself that if I wasn't accepted again, I would give up my ideas for a museum career, since it wasn't meant to be.  I was accepted and at the end of August 2005 drove myself across country to move to Peterborough.  I will share a few photos and describe my time there in my next post and if I haven't taken up too much space, will also describe my internship in London, Ontario with photos.